Recent years have seen an increasing awareness of the benefits of physical exercise and widespread use of exercising devices. One of the most common and widely used types of exercising device is the cable-type which typically employs an upright frame, an adjustable number of weights secured to a metal cable which extends about one or more pulleys carried by the frame to a hand grip. Depending on the location and orientation of the pulleys, different muscles or muscle groups can be exercised by repetitively pulling on the grip to raise the weights and then slowly returning the grip to its initial position to lower the weights. The hand grips used in such devices are generally of a "D"-shaped configuration comprising a short cylindrical metal gripping bar, the ends of which are secured to a curvilinear support to which the end of the cable or cable attachment is affixed. When doing many different exercises with such devices such as reverse curls and reverse tricep extensions it is necessary to continuously and tightly grip the gripping bar with one's hand and fingers. If the grip were relaxed during such exercises, the weights would fall.
As a result of the configuration of the hand grips used with the aforesaid cable exercising devices, considerable energy is continuously expended during many chest, shoulder and arm exercises in merely holding onto the grip. In addition, a considerable load is placed on the wrist as opposed to the chest, shoulder or portion of the arm for which the exercise was intended. This reduces the weight which can be lifted in such exercises and thus increases the effectiveness of the exercises. Further, people with arthritic fingers, hands or wrists generally cannot use such devices or, to the extent that they can, they are very limited as to the weight which can be attached to the cables.
In addition to the deleterious effects of continuously pulling against one's fingers during certain types of exercise, conventional cable grips can also be extremely uncomfortable to use during those exercises in which the cable rubs and/or snaps against the body. Given the widespread use of cable exercising equipment, it would be highly desirable to develop a hand grip for such equipment which could be readily substituted for the existing conventional grips and relieve the pressure on the hands, fingers and wrists during use without affecting the operation of the equipment, enabling the user to pull extra weight safely and comfortably. It would also be desirable to configure such a handle grip such that it obviated the need for a metal cable in close proximity to the grip to eliminate the physical discomfort caused during many exercises by that portion of the metal cable adjacent the hand grip. Such a hand grip is disclosed herein.